Tag Archives: Oxford University Press

Arthur was away for a bit, and so I took his place in a Smart Monkey Interview with Russel Southwood:

Part of our focus on university prescriptions meant ensuring that prescribed English and Classics setworks that were already available on Paperight were reformatted. I drew up a list and progress chart for the reformatting of these texts, and Philippa began the process of scrubbing the HTML for those titles. In the meantime, I continued to hack away at the CSS for the automated HTML-to-PDF conversion, to fix compatibility issues that had arisen when we switched over from Prince XML to DocRaptor. And, I continued testing the PDF-to-Paperight-PDF document conversion software on dev. Oscar continued to work on the university prescriptions list, completing the data and making sure that it was updated for 2014.

On our other content-generation fronts: Andi began an internship with us, working on the grade 11 and 12 question bank. Our conversations with Susanne Collins’ agent were going well, and our next step was to secure funding for the project.

I tried to set up a meeting with OUP to discuss reading tree books and expanding their catalogue, met with Hyreath from Juta, and sent her our contract and additional information. We also had further contact with Elsevier, WHO and Jacana about contracts and content, and set up a CoreSource channel to deal with RHS doc transfers.

Near the end of December, I did a comparison of analytics from 2012 to 2013. This included an analysis of traffic to paperight.com, taking into account both the total visits (including recurring users) and unique visits. As the current version of the Paperight site only went live in May 2012 (marked in the data by a *), all data for August 2011–April 2012 is for the earlier version of the site.

Fig 1.1 Overview of total visits from 2011–2013.

In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:

There is an overall increase in volume of traffic from 2012 to 2013

There are two definite dips, and two peaks in site traffic each year

Dips occur in June/July, and December each year

In 2012, the peaks for visits occurred in February and March, and again in October and November.

In 2013, the peaks for visits occurred in May and October, with two smaller peaks also occurring in February and August.

2011

2012

2013

Jan

NA

369

1979

Feb

NA

1282

2499

Mar

NA

1613

2141

Apr

NA

1078

2812

May

NA

1211*

3999

Jun

NA

950

3041

Jul

NA

1349

2467

Aug

12

1398

3054

Sep

185

1264

2494

Oct

334

2319

4363

Nov

215

2460

2779

Dec

203

727

672

Fig 1.2 Figures for total visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.

2011

2012

2013

Jan

NA

302

1454

Feb

NA

1120

2071

Mar

NA

1420

1663

Apr

NA

871

2076

May

NA

871*

3110

Jun

NA

567

2289

Jul

NA

875

1793

Aug

10

810

2455

Sep

166

964

1993

Oct

239

1765

3622

Nov

157

1857

2207

Dec

125

309

469

Fig 1.3 Overview of unique visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.

In analysing the license sales for the period from May 2012 to December 2013, it was necessary to show the number of copies sold per completed transaction each month. Transactions marked in red are the result of inhouse testing, those in green are actual sales.

Fig 2.1 Overview of actual vs. test license sales from 2011–2013.

In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:

There are peaks in May, July (Pelikan Park and Silverstream) and September (Kwamatua High and Tambalethu) of 2013, both as a result of sponsorship deals.

While in 2012 we had fairly high organic sales in August and October, we did not see these happening in 2013. The majority of these sales came from Silulo branches.

Graph also shows that actual sales in June and July 2012 were roughly the same. Spike was as a result of inhouse testing.

A comparison of license sales data to site traffic:

Fig 2.2 Overview of site traffic vs. license sales from 2011–2013.

The most interesting thing to note here is that high traffic volumes do not result in high sales. In fact, both years, almost every peak in sales is in a month where traffic is lower.

2011

2012

2013

Jan

NA

NA

16

Feb

NA

NA

25

Mar

NA

NA

170

Apr

NA

NA

44

May

NA

22

398

Jun

NA

76

72

Jul

NA

121

861

Aug

NA

228

84

Sep

NA

82

1410

Oct

NA

186

44

Nov

NA

173

25

Dec

NA

20

10

Fig 2.3 Overview of license sales on www.paperight.com from 2012–2013.